rather than pick out individual stocks to trade, it can often be worthwhile to trade the indices themselves, especially in times of high volatility.

for those so inclined, i attach below charts for FTSE and FTSE 250, though one might equally be tempted to trade Dow or S&P, which is significantly broader in its coverage, or even NASDAQ

for ease of reading, i have attached 1 year and 3 month charts in each instance

What does that mean?
Are they going to do it, or just talk about it? What about practicality.

Another crappy day on the markets......I love the month of may for the weather..spring..flowers etc....but as far as for the markets...it's always : yuck... now...

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another spiffing day drawing towards a close

Looks like another rubbish day .

It's going to volatile for some time to come methinks jimmy. Some great opportunities for Index trading though :-)

PMI figures probably didn't help, unemployment rate in 2 minutes!

splat ,i only trade shares now although i did have a punt on the Pound/Euro recently.
Indices /Forex i generally leave alone.

Anyone know which are the risers and fallers from the FTSE 100 list please in a week's time? Can't seem to find the info, though I know that EMG are due to potentially drop out.

Harry - this list is unofficial.

USD Unemployment Rate 8.2% consensus 8.1% previous 8.1%

USD Non-Farm Employment Change 69K consensus 151K previous 115K

CAD GDP m/m 0.1% consensus 0.4% previous -0.2%

USD Final Manufacturing PMI actual 54.0 previous 53.9

Not getting any better is it ?...

UK will have a very productive summer, with hotel bookings at all time high.

Hope so....

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5080, is one for the diary. It should be of some importance, probably a bounce point. Impossible to say yet, how far the low is away, but i'm expecting a huge bounce soon.
5080 may indeed be the bottom before a fresh HH, but if it gets breached easily we will be heading sub 5k (imo) fully expect this level to be hit next week...

JPMorgan has returned $600 million of MF Global money
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/jpmorgan-returned-600-million-mf-025533656.html

I wonder if there was a link between MF Global money held by JPM, MFG bankruptcy and the trades by JPM which went wrong.

MF Global customers and creditors may recover up to 97% of their cash (26% is guaranteed).

JPM might still hold hundreds of million dollars of MF Global money.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/05/08/uk-kpmg-pwc-idUKBRE8470TM20120508

i think it will be very stormy tomorrow and def a time to batten down the hatches .....

it ought to be a no-brainer to short the indices, but europe and dow have remained surprisingly firm in the face of some truly horrid numbers about lack of money supply worldwide, spain admitting it will need to be bailed out, greece now heading swiftly towards euro exit etc etc

i suppose another huge slab of money will be printed very soon, but will that really lighten the gloom for more than a day or two?